Tomas de Mattos a
you, an Uruguayan novelist, who has written several historical novels,
wrote a beautiful novel back in the, in the 90's.
Called in Spanish, La Fragata De Las Mascaras.
The frigate of the masks.
It's a literal translation.
This is an amazing text because Thomas De Mattos, whom I also got to meet and
interview, Thomas De Mattos is a Melville fanatic,
>> Hm.
>> An absolute Melville fanatic.
Latin-American writers are francophile, but they're amazingly voracious when it
comes to America, North-American classics. And Tomas de Mattos just loves Melville.
And his idea was, he took Benito Cereno by Melville,
and you may remember that Benito Cereno is a work of
fiction but is based on a real event that Melville used to.
>> Mm hm.
>> To, you know?
To tell his novel.
And, so then Thomas de Matos, you see the pattern?
>> Mm hm. >> It's slightly similar to.
>> Yeah, yeah. >>
[INAUDIBLE].
Although I think Thomas de Matos novel is earlier.
He takes the text of Benito Cereno.
And then he takes the historical text of what happened with that ship.
If you remember what happens in Benito Cereno
is that on the slave ship, the slaves
>> Revolted
>> Revolted. >> Mutiny.
Yeah.
>> They mutiny.
The slaves mutiny but of course in Buenitos Cereno, naturally, the story is
told the point of, from the point of view of the white man.
[FOREIGN]
Of course tells the whole story from the point of view of the mutineers.
The, the black mutineers.
>> And when was this published?
>> I don't remember the exact date, but I believe it was in the early 90's.
>> Early 90's.
>> Tomรกs De Mattos published La fragata de las mรกscaras de
>> So, one of the things a lot of these novels have in common
is, is a skewed point of view of, kind of revision of point of view.
>> Yes.
>> And in that regard, maybe we could end by going back to where we
began with Azuela.
And I know that the, the cover image for this focus really interesting
so well, tell us what we are seeing here in the, in this photograph?
It's a woodcut.
>> It's a woodcut and the woodcuts were very popular
in, in Mexico before the Revolution and during the Revolution.
Because it was a cheap way of of distributing images to the, the people and
the famous woodcut makers, Guadalupe Posada.
And when we were thinking about the cover
of the book my editor Rick Padhunter found this
this engraving that we're seeing here which is
not by Posada, we don't know who did it.
It's anonymous. And it's called
[FOREIGN]
which means
[FOREIGN]
skull which as you see is revolutionary except he's a skeleton.
>> Uh-huh.
>> Wearing his sombero and you know, with
his rifle on a very skeletal horse also.
and of course all of these very stark
image because they're all in black and white.